X!Family Appendix C. Obtaining, compiling and installing X!Family

X!Family is available from the !Family downloads page. Along with the latest version of these help pages.

The author (and occasional maintainer - development has been a bit slow to absent over the last three years) can be contacted as user family-maint on the site pennine.demon.co.uk.

Compiling X!Family: I haven't mastered the subtleties of ./configure, so some manual tweaking may be needed. First untar the download into a suitable directory:

# cd /usr/local/src/xfamily
# tar xzvf xfamily-v014.tgz
# cd v014

Now edit the line in the file "makeinclude" which specifies where your C++ headers live:

cppinclude	=/usr/include/c++/3.2

And edit the line in the "Makefile" which says where you compiled FLTK (ie. where the headers live, not the library):

FLTKHOME = /usr/src/fltk-1.1.4

Now compile it and clean up:

make clean
make depend
make
make tidy

At this point you should be able to run the code in place with

# ./XFamily &

But if you have root privilege, you can

# make install

Which should allow anyone to run it.

NOTE: this is alpha release software, and running in a terminal is recommended, as you can then see all the debugging info which will still be emitted. At present the GEDCOM file name is hard coded into the program as /usr/local/src/xfamily/test/test2.ged, but you can readily make this a symbolic link to your real data, or copy your data to this location:

ln -s /path/to/real/data/myfamily.ged /usr/local/src/xfamily/test/test2.ged

cp -v -p /path/to/real/data/myfamily.ged /usr/local/src/xfamily/test/test2.ged

Similarly, the location of the messages used for internationalisation are compiled in as /usr/local/src/xfamily/v014/messages/
In time, these messages should really be moved to the "installed" location at /usr/local/share/xfamily/messages/
Something very similar applies to the help pages, which at present don't work at all.

Hacking the code

If you want to make changes to the code, you may want to add translatable messages, which are coded in the source file "MessageSrc". The format is pretty transparent, and adding a new language is also fairly easy (and I'd welcome such translations). To get from this source to the various c++ and header files, and the formatted messages files, there is a Python script. In the source directory type

./StringFactory.py

If your changes to the code involve letting X!Family deal with new tags, you'll need to add these to the list in "KnownTags", and then run the script

./TagFactory.py

Of course, in time, these will be dealt with in the Makefile, with suitable dependencies.

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